and in the field till the peace, known as the Edict of Amboise, concluded in March 1563. On the return of war in 1567 he again hastened to the standard of Condé; on the 6th January 1568 he was with the advance guard when the battle of Gannat was brought on, and the brilliant charge with which he opened the battle was the prelude of victory. He continued to serve with distinction, chiefly as Governor of Montauban, till 1570. Many of the written orders which he received from Henry of Navarre and Henry Prince of Condé are preserved, all praising the confidence placed in him. The date of his death is not known, but in 1571 he is called the late noble Antoine; by his wife Cecile de Doux d’Ondas he left one son, who died young.
Jacques, the clerical brother, had died in 1567. The French Rapins thus descend from the youngest brother Philibert (born about 1530). He was a page to the Duke of Savoy; when he removed to France, he became the steward of the Duchesse of Enghien, the Prince of Condé’s sister; thence his courage, his conscience, and his consciousness of capacity naturally led him to serve under Condé himself. He was the mediator of the capitulation at Toulouse in 1562. In 1568 when a Peace, dated 20th March, between the Romanists and the Huguenots, had been signed at Longjumeau, Philbert de Rapin was sent with the safe-conduct of a royal envoy to deliver the treaty to the Parliament of Toulouse. With the perfidy of a Guise, the Cardinal de Lorraine had written to the parliament, interpreting a secret mark which might occasionally be found upon royal letters, and which was intended virtually to cancel their contents. When Rapin’s communication was examined, the fatal mark was found. He was reposing in his country house at Grenade, when parliamentary officers arrested him and loaded him with chains; some accusation of old date was revived, he was tried and sentenced, and on the 13th April (1568) was beheaded. Rapin’s death was avenged by the repudiation of the treaty and the continuance of war. And in January 1570 Coligny’s soldiers burnt the senators’ houses at Toulouse, and upon the ruins they wrote with hot charcoal, Vengeance de Rapin. He had married in 1556 Jeanne du Verger, an heiress, through whom he obtained the house of Grenade near Toulouse, and a landed estate which conveyed to him the title of Baron de Mauvers. He left two sons, of whom one died young; the other was Pierre de Rapin, Seigneur et Baron de Mauvers, who served in the Netherland in 1583 under the Duke of Anjou, and returned to serve on the staff of Henri of Navarre. He served with the Huguenots all his life. He contracted on paper on 8th October 1589 his marriage (which was solemnized 26th March 1591) with his first wife Olympe de Cavagnes, daughter of Arnaud de Cavagnes, formerly a Capitoul of Toulouse; the only child of this marriage died young. His second wife, whom he married on the 26th November 1602, was Perside, daughter of Jean de Lupe, Seigneur de Maravat. On his death in 1647, aged eighty-nine, he was succeeded in the Barony of Mauvers by his son, Jean, who was the eldest son of a family of twenty-two children, and who continued the senior branch of the Rapins. Jacques de Rapin, Seigneur of Thoyras near Grenade, a younger son of the octogenarian Baron, founded a junior branch, to which our literary refugee Rapin de Thoyras belonged. This celebrated refugee must not be confounded with his less known refugee kinsmen, who were the sons of Jean, Baron de Mauvers; that baron’s sons, by his wife Maria de Pichard, were Paul (Baron de Mauvers), Daniel, Francois, and Jean — the last three being refugees. Colonel Daniel Rapin (born 1649, died 1729) was the first French officer of the refugees who offered his sword to Holland, he served King William in Ireland as a captain, and became a colonel in the British army in 1700; in 1709, owing to some misunderstanding, he finally emigrated to Utrecht. Captain Francis Rapin was killed before the Castle of Charlemont in 1690, in which year his brother Major John Rapin of Belcastel’s regiment was also slain in fight.
The Seigneur de Thoyras (father of the literary refugee) was born in Mas-Garnier, of which his father was Governor, in December 1613. His warrior father desired all his sons to join the army, but the mother, perceiving Jacques’ talents, obtained an exception to the rule on his behalf. He was educated at Montauban, and was called to the bar. He became the leading Protestant Advocate in the Chamber of the Edict for Languedoc attached to the parliament of Toulouse. The proper seat of this Chamber was the town of Castres, though the caprice of Romanist rule often compelled the court to shift its quarters. In 1654 he married Jeanne de Pelisson, a great-grand-daughter of the celebrated President Raymond Pelisson; her grandfather was that son of this Romanist family who became a convert to Protestantism, and adhered to it to the last; her grandmother was Jeanne Du Bourg, daughter of the Chancellor; her father was Jean Jacques Pelisson, and her mother the eminently beautiful and pious Jeanne de Fontanier. The latter Pclissons lived at Castres, and were members of the literary Academy of that town, of which
